Penn State News– Researchers from Penn State University (PSU) are leading a team to study a new flexible strategy to ramp up installation of riparian buffers. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) awarded the group that includes several PSU researchers across multiple disciplines, along with a USDA researcher and a University of Maryland economist nearly $500,000.

Vegetative buffers adjacent to streams and other water bodies have proven to be very effective at reducing nutrients and sediments before they enter waterways. Watersheds around the country are prioritizing the protection and restoration of these areas.

This is particularly true in Pennsylvania, as the state has ambitious plans to help meet Chesapeake Bay Program water quality goals, including establishing an additional 95,000 acres of riparian forest buffers to be in place by 2025.

While buffers provide significant ecosystem benefits, they can be expensive to install, and because they can entail removing cropland from profitable intensive farming, they can have high costs for farmers, she explained. Effective buffers are not short-term landscape changes — the most effective are long-term ecosystem investments and correspondingly long-term restrictions on farmers’ land-use choices.

“Even with financial assistance to help cover installation and other costs, those constraints may deter adoption,” Gall said. “A key issue influencing farmers’ willingness to adopt this practice involves buffer design standards that must be satisfied to receive assistance — the more restrictive the standards, the greater the reluctance to install buffers. So buffer policymakers face a trade-off between buffer performance and adoption.”

To boost riparian-buffer creation, researchers will design choice experiments that provide flexible options to landowners in two Pennsylvania watersheds — Spring Creek in Centre County and Conewago Creek in Dauphin County. Those options will gauge how offering a wider array of choices for width, vegetation type, spatial arrangement and management affects farmers’ willingness to adopt buffers.

The unique aspect of the research is the melding of biophysical and social sciences with extension outreach, Gall said. It avoids the appearance of scientists independently determining a solution without integrating aspects valued by farmers and stakeholders.

“We won’t have biophysical scientists running hypothetical scenarios on their computers, while not communicating with the people actually adopting these practices on their farms and not knowing what these people want and are willing to implement,” she said.

“This will bring in the social science and the extension component to say, ‘OK, in the first year, rather than just start modeling, let’s go talk to landowners and learn what they want, and then we can bring that back to the modelers to explore what various desirable scenarios look like from a water-quality perspective.'”